Tag Archives: the madman’s daughter

Plots. So hard to conceive. So necessary to craft well. You’ll often hear writers talk about the struggle to tease the plot out of the characters, but when I asked YA author Megan Shepherd about her process, she reflected more on the joy than the struggle. She wrote:

“One of the trickiest parts of writing for me is also one of the most fun: plot twists. I adore books with surprising twists in them, and so I always try to add unexpected turns in my own. However, it’s a fine balance to plant enough clues so that readers don’t feel cheated when the twist hits them, but not too many so that they guess the twist way in advance. My rule of thumb is to set up a situation where there are two possible outcomes, Outcome A or Outcome B, and you try to make readers guess which one it will be, and then bam! You hit them with Outcome C.”

Okay, that paragraph alone made me want to read Megan’s debut, The Madman’s Daughter, just out from Balzer+Bray/HarperCollins. Megan made it sound tricky, but … easy… when I know it’s not at all. I turned to another YA writer, Lenore Applehans, and asked about her plot-process. (Lenore’s debut, Level 2, has just been released from Simon & Schuster.) I wanted to know whether her approach was similar to Megan’s. But do any two writers have the same process? Of course not. Lenore told me:

“When I got the idea for Level 2, the main plot twists and characters kinda showed up at the same time. I worked hard with my editor to make sure that the plot made sense within the context of character motivations and choices. While I wrote with a minimal outline, I did have a vision for the story—so that everything I wrote was in service of the ultimate character arcs and I didn’t have to go back and cut a lot of filler. In fact, my first draft was very spare, so revision was about adding instead of subtracting.”

So Megan and Lenore came at their stories from very different angles, but both crafted plots that made sense and didn’t make the reader feel cheated. What I find interesting is the notion that if writers do their jobs well, they become transparent; readers don’t see or feel the writer’s presence on the page. It’s kind of ironic, isn’t it? The writer puts in all the work, but in the end, it’s not about the writer. It’s about the story. The characters. The surprising twists. The vicarious experience of another world… And just thinking about it makes me want to curl up in an overstuffed chair with a good book. Okay, I’m done here…